Prisoner Rehabilitation

Jose Luis Munoz pocketed the $200 "gate money" and jumped inside a prison staff car that drove him to the bus station in Delano, just up California 99 from Bakersfield. Flames fanned by October's Santa Ana winds had Southern California ablaze, but after a year behind bars, he was willing to walk through fire to get home. The bus ticket set him back $20, but the man known by the gang moniker Dopey was returning to Anaheim richer than he ever imagined.

It happened again at a Taco Bell. The old way of thinking, the criminal voice, wouldn't shut up inside the head of Ken Layton. Yeah, take out that punk kid, beat the crap out of him, show that pimply faced idiot he ain't nothin' and you're still Folsom Kenny Layton. He was standing in line at the fast-food joint, behind an overwhelmed woman with an unruly child. She was complaining about her order, and the kid behind the counter kept putting her down. "He was rude," Layton said. "Sarcastic."

IT'S a warm, cloudless day and Patty O'Reilly is about to meet the man who killed her husband. A million thoughts compete for attention in her head. Two stand out. \o7Why am I here? What good will it do?\f7 It has taken O'Reilly 29 months to get to this emotional state, to the point where she can walk on sturdy legs into a maximum-security prison and face a convict who blasted a giant crater in her life. In the beginning, O'Reilly felt only loathing for the man.

California's $1-billion investment in drug treatment for prisoners since 1989 has been "a complete waste of money," the state's inspector general said Wednesday, and has done nothing to reduce the number of inmates cycling in and out of custody. One study of the two largest in-prison programs found that recidivism rates for inmates who participated were actually a bit higher than those of a group of convicts who did not receive treatment, Inspector General Matt Cate said.

The most comprehensive assessment of California's landmark effort to treat drug users rather than jail them has found that nearly half of offenders sentenced under the program fail to complete rehab and more than a quarter never show up for treatment. The high failure rates have prompted a growing number of critics to call for jail sanctions for defendants they say take advantage of the program's lack of penalties. Voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 36 in November 2000.

PAT Nolan's views on crime and punishment took root when he was 8 years old, delivering newspapers on the streets of Los Angeles. Time and again, neighborhood punks preyed on him -- stealing his bike, roughing him up and clouding his days with fear. Two decades later, Nolan won a seat in the state Assembly, where those childhood scars drove him to fight for more prisons and tougher sentencing. Nothing, he believed, was too bad for the bad guys. Then Nolan became one of the bad guys.

For years, Dorsey Nunn informally compiled the grievances of other former prisoners denied housing, frozen out of job interviews or abruptly fired years after they had done their time. But when his wife, also formerly incarcerated, was rejected no-questions-asked as a volunteer in one of this crime-pocked city's neediest elementary schools, he decided he'd had enough. How, Nunn asked, could he and millions of other felons contribute to society if society no longer wanted them?

Fewer than 40% of the inmates released from state prisons in 2003 were back behind bars one year after their release, the lowest rate in a quarter of a century, corrections officials announced Monday. California's two-year return rate, which some experts consider a more useful barometer, also has declined, reaching its lowest point since 1991. That number has been dropping steadily over the last four years. Of the 54,877 inmates who were paroled in 2003, a little more than half -- 51.

Eleven years ago, Larry Wayne Dixon Jr. was sentenced to 20 years' hard time for killing a man in a Mobile bar fight. But on a recent Wednesday at dawn, he was blazing across a pasture at the Charles A. Farquhar State Cattle Ranch on a big brown quarter horse, his parries, feints and hollers moving a herd of recalcitrant cattle the way Moses once moved water.

Gina Tatum spends her days in a compound surrounded by electrified fence in the sun-baked heart of the Central Valley, hoping to change her life. She will soon turn 50, and after two decades in and out of prison, she says she is tired of victimizing others, tired of stealing, tired of doing drugs. "I can't afford any more years up here -- I've lost too many," said Tatum, who is serving a four-year stint for forgery at the Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla. "I'm trying to learn things to change my thinking, change everything about me, so I can go home.